


The One Where it's Thanksgiving

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Canon Trans Character, F/M, M/M, Thanksgiving Dinner
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-27
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 13:15:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16430090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: For the Zoldycks, a world class family of Olympic athletes, any holiday that involves bringing in the extended family under one roof is a recipe for chaos at best. Killua Zoldyck, with his various allies inside and outside of the household, plans to use the cover of chaos to disguise the ultimate family faux pas: heisting away his own sister.





	The One Where it's Thanksgiving

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this before I did the LA oneshot AU, so there's some conceptual overlap. It's not the same AU, I should clarify--Gon knows where his dad is, and the Zoldycks don't work in Hollywood, to start with.

There are two kinds of old houses, as anyone who knows anything about houses will tell you: houses that lose their value as they begin to degrade, because the things humans make don’t last much longer than the humans who make them, and houses that are worth a fortune proportional to the fortune it costs to maintain a thing that leaks money like water from a rusting 20 year old pipe.

When the Zoldyck—nee Calparson—mansion was built, indoor toilets were still state of the art. Since then, it has needed an electrical wiring overhaul, a new west wing, internal air conditioning, every kitchen implement installed before the 1940s replaced, and several modifications for television and internet compatibility. This might strike the savvy individual as somewhat financially wasteful, when new and customizable houses are so readily available these days, but the Zoldycks will tell you that after a certain point you find that you have sunk enough money into an enterprise to be entirely unsure how to extract your claws from it once and for all. That, and these days it is much more difficult to get five acres of private land in every direction anywhere near a city.

The mansion is in a neighborhood, but you would never know that from the road or from the doorstep. The place was acquired by Zigg Zoldyck from a business competitor during the stock market crash, as part of a semi-legal deal that left his competitor holding two quarts of moonshine, a sputtering 1925 Bently, and the contents of a bag of change tucked away secretly in the toe of an old shoe.

There is a small house at the edge of the property where members of the staff without families of their own can stay in exchange for a reduced paycheck each month, which remains fairly generous even with the cut. Loyalty within the staff is high, despite the continual theatrics of the matron of the house, who is prone to what her children call _fits_ , and relishes the appearance of being of a woman who cannot accomplish even simple tasks without calling a servant to her aid. It’s a deeply misleading appearance, but still.

People who know Kikyo Zoldyck, and who are acquainted with her staff’s unwavering loyalty, are often perplexed. Between her shrill shouting and her extremely specific orders, it seems a wonder that she manages to keep any staff at all, especially in a world that is willing to pay top dollar for pictures of celebrated Olympic gold medalists engaging in scandalous behavior. With the aid of a camera and phone call, it would be quite easy to walk away from that post with a hefty bonus in your pocket and never look back.

“Whatever she’s paying you,” a guest once remarked to a butler, sipping brandy from a crystal decanter, “it can’t be worth listening to her yap day in and day out. I’d get out if I were you.”

The next time he visited, there was no brandy for him in the decanter. The house, to all appearances, had suddenly run dry.

What guests and celebrity columnists and even the majority of the staff don’t know, is that Kikyo Zoldyck—nee Saitō—worked in her youth, dropping out of high school to do very much the same jobs she now hires others to do, before ambition and hard work buoyed her to the Olympics. She is much shrewder and more worldly than she cares for people to know; her own children generally assume that she elbowed her way into the world fully formed and shouting for someone to carry her bags. But she remembers, of course, practicing archery in the alley behind her apartment, her wrist wrapped in a washcloth taped down to stop the string from snapping her again. She remembers how far a paycheck needs to go. This is not the story she tells Hisoka Morow, on Thanksgiving afternoon, but it is a story that she thinks he (out of all her dinner guests) would not pity her for, and that is why she is currently fetching him the Good Brandy.

Hisoka is her son’s friend, and in six hours he will set fire to the servants’ quarters and leave the property on foot at a leisurely walking pace. Hisoka is as much an enigma as the woman who is shouting at him through the dining room wall, and as far as his acquaintances can tell, his life began the day he stepped out of prison and onto the LA streets. The pale teardrop shaped tattoo below his eye certainly goes a long way towards stopping nosy questions before they can make the leap from tongue to air.

He likes the brandy they serve at the Zoldyck mansion. He likes Kikyo as well, and the flashes of shrewdness that he caught between her words, like dark fish rippling beneath the illusion of a reflected sky.

Today she’s telling him about the time she sabotaged a competitor at the pre-olympic level by helping his wife run off with another man just before the finals. The train tickets cost her the last penny in her bank account, but in the long run—as the house around her demonstrates—it paid for itself with interest.

“I’ll never forget his face,” she’s saying, as she picks up the emptied tray and hands it to Gotoh, her butler. Gotoh has been hovering since Hisoka arrived, blending into the edge of the room with the practiced skill of a veteran manservant. He does _not_ find Hisoka charming. In fact, he finds their guest somewhat troubling.

“I’m sure he was the picture of surprise,” Hisoka agrees, smiling at Gotoh as he sets his own plate on the tray.

Hisoka has been making friendly eye contact all afternoon, and Gotoh suspects that its singular purpose is to make it clear that Hisoka has not forgotten how many people are in the room. Frankly any extended attention in Gotoh’s direction disquiets him. Like anyone, Gotoh has secrets of his own. He has several dusty love letters addressed to a Ms. K Z locked away in his office, and every time Hisoka looks at him he can practically feel his pen hand itching. It’s almost as if he _knows,_ which he cannot possibly _._

“Madam, will you step into the kitchen with me for just a moment?” Gotoh asks, bowing apologetically. He certainly does not intend to leave her alone with this creature an instant longer than can be avoided. “Dinner is coming along well, but it is best if we make sure everything is to your satisfaction now, before any mistakes are made.”

Kikyo pats her intricate bun, mollified. Thanksgiving has always been an exhibition, under her supervision. She is Japanese, of course, but any opportunity to establish a dictatorship in the kitchen and lay out the good silver is enough of a holiday for her. Thanksgiving is the second biggest highlight of her year. She allows herself to be herded away, still shouting over her shoulder to Hisoka about _Nakamura-san’s_ face when he saw the ticket stubs, as she disappears around the corner. Her voice fades to a dull whine, and then mute nothingness. Hisoka sits for a moment in the living room, hands folded over his knees, poised and thoughtful as a cat. Unlike most people, Hisoka really has nothing that could be labeled as _pride_ , and is perfectly comfortable being condescended to and preached at if the exchange is interesting enough. This makes him the ideal conversational partner for Kikyo.

After a few moments of silence, he stands up and prowls the edges of the room, observing the more unorthodox decorations with interest. The antique dueling pistol that failed spectacularly to save Zigg Zoldyck’s life gets a once over, and the set of curved knives mounted on the wall get a twice over—Hisoka lifts one from its hooks and spins it in his hand. The handles curl and glimmer with silverwork, flourishes that reflect back the deep greens and blacks of the décor. All the sharp outlines of reality disappear in that warped reflection. The tip is wickedly sharp against Hisoka’s thumb, a thirsty thing that nearly manages to split him open before the door unlatches and falls open with a sound like creaking bones.

“What are you doing here?”

Hisoka looks up from the precariously balanced blade to the atrium, where Illumi is standing. Hisoka spins the knife again, carelessly, and drops it back onto its hooks. He glances pointedly back towards the hall to the kitchen, where Kikyo’s voice is gathering steam and decibels as it approaches.

Illumi’s forehead wrinkles with a single sharp frown line.

“Mother,” he says, the moment she comes around the corner. “What is Hisoka doing here?”

“I invited him, of course,” Kikyo says, returning her oversized Gucci sunglasses to her nose. The kitchen has a tendency to steam them up.

Illumi looks between Hisoka and his mother, and says, “Why?”

“Oh,” Kikyo says, settling on the sofa with a flip of her couture skirts. “Well the poor thing hasn’t got a family of his own, has he? And you’ve been so charitable, looking out for him since he got out of that awful place, I thought we could certainly spare a place setting for him. You’re such a good influence, darling.”

Illumi, who never helped Hisoka so much as move a couch, gives his mother a look she happily interpreted as ‘grateful’.

“I knew you’d love it,” Kikyo concludes. She waves a hand at a passing servant and calls, “Canary, fetch Illumi one of those disgusting lime sodas he likes so much.”

Canary bows and turned towards the kitchen, putting her previous assignment—getting more cooking oil from the storage pantry—on hold for the moment.

After four years working in the mansion, she’d begun to form her own opinions about how a house should be run, and these did not include stopping to fetch lime soda in the middle of another task. But it had never been her place to remark on such things. Canary was hired the day she turned fourteen, which was not strictly legal, but the envelope full of cash that no one was reporting to the IRA wasn’t strictly legal either. Canary had her own plans, of which she had spoken to no one any more than she had spoken of her opinions regarding lime soda.

If her mother had survived then things would have been different, but as it stood, she quickly came to discover that the best way to live with foster care was to spend as much time out of her new home as possible, and to make as much cash as she could.

She ducks through the clamoring kitchen with practiced grace, sliding underneath the girth of an enormous mixing bowl on her way to the small refrigerator. As she tugs one can free from the grip of a six pack, Amane appears at her elbow. A yellow Tupperware cradled in hand like a wounded bird, the other servant's perfectly stiff expression belies the gentleness with which she shields her cargo from the chaos of the kitchen.

“Master Killua called ahead,” she says, pushing the Tupperware into Canary’s hands. “He wants you to be sure that this gets downstairs.”

Canary glances left and then right, but the staff are too caught up in their business to eavesdrop on two teenagers exchanging supplies. “He won’t be taking it himself?” she asks, willing her features to remain neutral. “The last three years—”

“Given certain plans,” Amane says, reaching past her for the fridge door, still gaping open, “It’s better if he doesn’t draw attention to her this year, don’t you think?”

“Oh,” Canary says. The back of her shirt is cold with chilled air, even as Amane pushes the door closed.

She must betray an inkling of uncertainty, because Amane adds, quietly, as she pulls away, “He says he’s bringing a friend.”

Canary immediately thinks of Gon Freecs, who appeared on the doorstep at two in the morning last year despite the mansion’s extensive security system and numerous guard dogs—lower tech but no less effective—and refused to be budged from the doorstep until he had spoken to Killua in person.

Kikyo had literally been dialing 911 when her husband plucked the phone from her hand and set it back in its holster. There was shouting in the living room for a long time after that. Canary waited on the doorstep with Gon for an hour, mostly in silence, while the adults tried to figure out what to do with these unyielding, inflexible teenagers.  She remembers his untroubled expression, how he tucked his hands behind his back and didn’t fidget. He seemed to her to be impossibly certain, as if he could already see the coming morning and knew that it would dawn in his favor. A sunrise with Killua, a backpack over his shoulder, and hiking shoes on his feet.

And he left the property with the closest thing to a friend Canary had ever had, taking him off to sail the Atlantic and ride trains in foreign countries. And she was happy that he could go, but sorry to have to remain behind.

Amane’s lip twitches, like she’s transmitting a secret smile, and she leaves. Amane doesn’t know everything that Canary knows, but she can tell that Canary is troubled, and she’s trying to be a little softer around her. It’s nice. Canary could easily take the hand she’s being offered, accept the wary overture of alliance and, perhaps even, friendship. But Amane is from a long line of Zoldyck staff, and her sympathy will only cause her trouble if what Canary is doing comes to light. Canary doesn’t want that for her.

Canary delivers the soda (Kikyo is telling the gruesome shotput story again, much to her guest’s delight), delivers the belated cooking oil (the chef is nearly in hysterics), and leaves the bright hot clamor of the kitchens for the stillness of the east wing. It’s dark here, to save electricity. No one much comes this way. She takes the elevator down to the bottom floor, and flicks on the lights as she goes. The mansion is set into a hill, and so this floor crouches in the earth below it, one set of windows overlooking the gardens below. She finds Alluka building an elaborate courtroom scene from a host of stuffed animals and carefully stacked books. Her nearly life-sized giraffe is presiding over the affair.

“Miss Alluka,” Canary says, and watches the way Alluka lights up at the sound of her name. It doesn’t last long.

“Where’s Killua?” she asks, tucking a stuffed rabbit under her arm. “It’s Thanksgiving, he always brings me dinner on thanksgiving.”

“He sent me with it,” Canary says. She offers the food, but Alluka looks at it with such absolute reproach that Canary can barely stand to hold it any longer. She sets it down on a table and takes a step towards Alluka, palms out, as if she has anything to offer the girl.

“It’s because he’s been traveling,” Alluka says, quickly coming to the same conclusion as Amane before her. “He’s trying not to make waves so that they’ll let him keep doing it. He doesn’t want them to—remember about me.”

Alluka looks so furious and devastated that Canary is across the floor before she can remember that she’s only staff. She takes Alluka’s hands. The stuffed rabbit drops to the floor beside them and falls over. Alluka is an ugly crier, all red cheeks and scrunched forehead and glassy eyes.

“I’m certain that he’ll be down later,” Canary says, squeezing her hands. “He’s just not here yet, that’s all.”

Alluka sniffles, a wet pathetic little sound, and it nearly breaks Canary’s heart. Truth be told, before Killua left the mansion, Canary was hardly aware of Alluka’s existence. No one was, really. She kept to her rooms, ate alone, wandered the garden—Killua took her most of her meals, and the cleaning staff only ventured down every so often to make sure she hadn’t left anything terrifying in her minifridge. The Zoldycks never talked about her. But then when Killua left, someone had to start bringing her meals down.

“Promise?” Alluka says, and the funny thing is that—as far as Canary can tell—no one has ever broken a promise to her before. Kikyo promises her new clothes, Silva promises her a visit to the kennel, but no one has ever made her a promise important enough to break. She’s sixteen, and she’s never been to a mall, or to a school, or a birthday party. Her rooms are filled with movies and books that take place firmly in the realm of the fantastic, the historical—nothing about the world outside, as it exists now. Her tutors come and go, and they have nothing to say about where it is they come and go from.

There are times that Canary feels trapped by this house, limited and isolated from the world five acres in every direction, but at least she knows how to leave. Alluka wouldn’t even know where to start.

“Promise,” Canary says. She wouldn’t promise unless she was certain. If nothing else, Alluka at least deserves honesty.

In Canary’s rooms—which she has had ever since she emancipated herself at sixteen to come live on site with the rest of the staff—there are all sorts of documents lifted quietly from the main house. She keeps them all neatly in a drawer, because stuffing them at the back of her closet would only make her look more suspicious. She has a copy of the forms that Silva filled out to get Alluka her inhaler, she has the medical expenses which were sent on to the insurance company the day after she copied them, she has several letters exchanged between the family and a certain boarding school well known for its conservative and traditional values—in summary, she has collected something extremely suspect. These papers, destined for the shredder as of today, would have disastrous implications if they were to be discovered.

Canary, after all, has plans.

 

 

Once Alluka is alone with her dinner, she goes back to arranging her court room scene. Alluka is vaguely aware that there’s an age where girls are supposed to put away their toys, but her books have been awfully vague about it and her mother hasn’t mentioned it—well, her mother would say that there’s a time for _boys_ to put their toys away, but so far Alluka hasn’t heard anything about that either. She’s definitely heard enough about _grown boys not having imaginary friends_ that she fully expects her mother will let her know when the time comes to put toys away. That doesn’t mean she’s going to _do_ it, of course, not any more than she’s put Nanika away, but at least she’ll know.

Anyways, this scene is going to be the climax from _A Tale of Two Cities_ , once she finds an appropriate substitute for a guillotine.

The sun is disappearing behind the tangle of trees at the edge of the property when a tap comes on her window. She looks up, and the first thing she notices is the drifting of the swingset seat, as if someone had jumped from it. Then she notices the boy. He’s tanned and dark, especially considering the season, hanging around the door like he’s ready to bolt any second. Alluka’s heart skips. She hasn’t ever had a visitor before, not one who wasn’t a doctor or a tutor.

Her hands stumble over themselves as she lets him in.

“Hi,” he says, holding out a hand. “Are you Alluka?”

“Yes!” she says. She shakes his hand with both of hers, pumping it a little bit harder than he expects her to. His elbow does something weird as he tries to catch up with her enthusiasm.

“I’m Gon Freecs,” he tells her, smiling wider. He’s gotten the hang of her handshake now, which is still going strong.

She freezes. “Oh,” she says. “You’re the boy who took Killua away.”

Gon looks down at their joined hands, suspended mid-pump. “I didn’t take him away,” he says, but then he pauses to really think about it. “Well,” he amends, “I guess I did, but now I’m bringing him back.”

Alluka is still feeling a smidge resentful, but Gon has such an earnest smile and he’s still holding her hand and she remembers that ladies are supposed to be gracious. “I’ll forgive you,” she says, seriously, “as long as you don’t do it again.”

Gon’s smile grows even wider, astonishingly so, and he tells her, “I’ll do you one better.”

“Huh?”

But Gon has already let her go and is trotting towards the elevator. “Come on,” he says, “I’ll take you up. Dinner should be starting soon, and Killua says once they start sitting down I need to be in the group.”

“Oh, no,” she says, bemused, “I don’t eat with the family. I already had my dinner brought down to me.”

Gon pauses with his finger over the up button. “But—“ he says, “but it’s thanksgiving. That’s a big deal here. Even Killua came back for it.”

Alluka doesn’t like the way he’s looking at her, as if she’s a difficult math problem he’s trying to take apart. People look at her like that when they see her inhaler, or her dresses, or the place where her imaginary friend is not. She shrinks back, adjusts the waistband of her skirt. “Mother and father don’t like the guests to see me,” she explains. “I’m not—going anywhere. Not like the others are.”

“Going anywhere?” Gon echoes.

“I wanted to do figure skating like Illumi,” she says, because the most important thing here is to emphasize that she _would_ have done it if she could have. Her mother likes to hear that. In truth, she’s only vaguely entertained the idea. “But my asthma is too serious, see, I can’t even go outside in the spring.”

“So you don’t even get to go upstairs?” Gon asks, standing much too still for her liking.

“I can go upstairs,” she says quickly, “just not when we have guests. Or when we have family over. And I try to stay out of the way when Illumi is in the house, because he always seems so disappointed.” She doesn’t mention that even though she can technically go upstairs, she never feels welcome there, and so she generally doesn’t. Somehow she can sense that Gon won’t like that.

Gon presses his palm flat against the wall, just beside the elevator button. He keeps it there for a moment, not saying anything, and then he turns to look at her. His expression is so profoundly unhappy that she rolls the conversation back over in her mind, trying to figure out what she’s done wrong. If Gon decides he doesn’t like her, he might take Killua away forever.

“Killua told me,” he says, “that you didn’t get along with your family either. But I thought he meant that you were like him, that you didn’t want to do what they were telling you to, and they were mad about it.”

“Um,” she says, but she still can’t figure out where this conversation went wrong.

Gon hits the elevator button with his whole hand, hand enough that it makes a dull ringing sound. “I’m mad,” he tells her.

“Are you mad at me?” she asks in the smallest voice she has.

His eyes go wide. “No!” he says, “Why would I be mad at you?”

“I don’t know.” Alluka laces her fingers together. “Sometimes people just are just mad at me. There’s a lot of things to be mad about.”

Gon shoves his hands into his pockets and looks mutinous. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” he tells her. “Not one thing. It’s everyone else who’s done you wrong.”

No one has ever said anything like that to Alluka before. It’s like an echo of her own voice, in her head, the voice she gives to Nanika, saying that her mother is being unreasonable. The voice that says Illumi is being unfair. The voice that wants Killua to stand up for her, just once, when everyone is shaking their heads in her direction. This is what Nanika does—tells her what is and isn’t her fault, when the rest of the world is insisting that it’s all the same.

The elevator dings, and the door slides open. Gon brightens, as he backs into it, all at once. It’s like he switched on the overhead light. “Don’t worry, though,” he says, “because we’re gonna do something about it.”

As the door closes in front of him, Alluka thinks that she can understand why Killua went with him, before. Her room feels colder and darker with him gone.

 

 

Gon takes the elevator up to the main floor and tries to keep the smile on his face. He’s no good at faking emotions, even the outwards expressions that go with them—his poker face is the worst of anyone he knows—so what he does is focus on how he’s going to help Alluka. If he can just keep it in his head through this dinner, he’ll be able to take anything.

Probably going around to meet Alluka before dinner had been a mistake, for his poker face if nothing else. Killua had just said to let himself in through the sunroom, where one of the junior staff would be polishing silverware. But Gon had wanted to meet Killua’s sister, and it seemed like as good a time as any, and he had just… gone with it. Later would be so _busy_.

He can’t believe Killua hadn’t told him how bad things were. Zoldycks are all so strange, even Killua, although he tries not to be.

Gon slips into the heart of the mansion without too much fuss. Some of the staff remember him from his midnight vigil on the doorstep last year, and they nod to him as they go past. He snags an apple from a passing tray, heavy and red with autumn, and crunches into it as he navigates the corridors towards the family.

Gon figured that it would be harder to stop him from coming if he was already here, and Killua had said it wasn’t any stupider than their usual plans. So here he was, eating an apple and watching Mrs. Zoldyck mime a golf swing in her living room, her suede orange pumps turning with mathematical precision on the carpet.

Killua said that there would be at least twelve people, between the brothers and the grandparents and the cousins, and then if anyone else brought guests that would tick the counter even higher. Gon counts up the immediate relatives (seven) and then the extended family (four), and finds one left over. It’s a stranger, lounging on the sofa, with hair just slightly too red to be natural. He doesn’t look like Mrs. Zoldyck (too pale), or Mr. Zoldyck (too sharp), and not quite enough like any of the cousins to be one of them.

He catches Gon looking. Their eyes meet—his brow goes up, vaguely challenging—but Gon doesn’t look away. Gon wouldn’t know how to look away from something that caught his interest, even if he had the inclination to. His aunt told him plenty of times growing up that it was rude to stare, but he’s decided—on his own, like he does most things—that there’s nothing wrong with looking at people, so long as you don’t try to hide it. If you hide it, that means you must be doing something wrong. Gon tilts his head slightly, waiting for the stranger to make a move.

For a moment he does nothing. Then he smiles, and it’s like the claws sliding out of a cat. Before, he had been soft-edged and languid, content to watch the room with half-lidded eyes, and Gon hadn’t even noticed where he ended and the rest of the room began. Now he practically flashes, knife-edged and intent, as he shows Gon the full array of his white, white teeth.

The apple slips out of Gon’s distracted hand, which is slack and wet with juice now, and it bounces across the floor. The stranger looks from the rolling fruit back up to Gon, and says, “Oh dear. What a shame.”

That draws Mrs. Zoldyck’s attention. She follows the trajectory of the apple back to Gon, and her bug-eyed shades slip down her nose. “You!” she shouts, pointing a trembling finger at him.

“It’s very nice to see you, ma’am,” Gon tells her, which is sort of a big lie but also the polite thing to say.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demands, her voice ratcheting up into a register mostly occupied by dolphins and small birds.

“Killua invited me,” Gon says, and he hops down from the hallway into the depression that the living room occupies. “I’m his plus one.”

“You can’t—this is entirely unacceptable, I won’t stand for—Silva, tell this boy that he’s not welcome here!”

Silva rises from the cluster of cousins like an iceberg from the sea. There are big men, and then there are _big_ men; as heavyweight champion of the judo competition two Olympic summers in a row, Silva is decidedly the latter. It is common knowledge that Killua is his favorite son, but it is also common knowledge that when Killua left last year it was ultimately with his blessing.

He looks at Gon. Gon looks back. His wife is practically steaming; she looks close to climbing the coffee table in a fit of hysterics.

“I don’t see what the problem is,” Silva announces, slowly, “as long as Killua did indeed invite him. After all, Illumi brought his own guest tonight. We can’t send one away without sending the other as well.”

Illumi makes a sound of protest, but he’s ignored.

Gon clasps his hands in front of him. “Thank you,” he says, and thinks furiously about what they have planned for later tonight, to distract himself from saying anything reckless now.

The tension in the room lightens, a bit, and the stranger—amber eyes bright with secret laughter—draws Mrs. Zoldyck back into conversation. She keeps looking at Gon, as if she wants to start something, but the stranger reels her in with such skill that she eventually loses the fight to stay below water, and goes willingly with the hook.

Who is that one, anyways? Gon wasn’t aware that Illumi _had_ friends. In fact, he had struck Gon as the kind of person who wouldn’t know how to trust another person with his door keys, let alone his friendship.

Gon circles the edge of the room and finds Killua in the dining room, helping Canary set the places.

“Oh,” Killua says, halting in the middle of folding a napkin. He’s doing a bad job of it too. “They spotted you already?”

Gon nods, and takes the napkin from him. It’s not Killua’s fault that he was raised rich, but it sure makes getting basic stuff done difficult for him some times.

“Weird. I thought there would be screaming.”

Gon hands back the napkin. “I think there would have been,” he says, “but your dad took my side. Sort of. Did you know Illumi was bringing a friend?”

Killua snorts. “Illumi has friends? That doesn’t sound like him.”

Gon frowns. “That’s what I was thinking,” he says. “Maybe we misjudged him.”

“Forget it,” Killua says, a note of warning in his voice, “you don’t know him like I do. He’s not gonna help us, I don’t care if he has a _stadium_ full of friends.”

“Excuse me,” Canary interrupts, “could I get past you?”

They both scramble to get out of her way.

She does her best not to bother them, but they’re both intent on being helpful and they trail along in her wake, uneasily looking for something to contribute. It’s throwing her off balance. This isn’t the first year that Killua has come and waited near her, while she set out the places for dinner—usually he talks at her, occasionally asks her questions—but this is the first year he’s wanted to _fold napkins._ She doesn’t quite know what to do with it. It’s not that the gesture is unwanted, it’s just that she worries what the lady of the house will think. She worries that it will look like her own incompetence, rather than Killua’s new and off-balancing urge to teamwork. The lady of the house, after all, refuses to accept that any of her children have diverged from her vision of them.

Traveling with Gon has clearly changed him. She thinks that she likes the person he is turning into; it’s only that—if she’s honest with herself—he’s somehow a little less _hers_ than he was when he left.

She finishes setting everything out and returns to the kitchen, leaving Killua and Gon hotly debating the merits of some movie they both went to see. Canary hasn’t been to a movie in years—she spends her days off running errands for herself, and studying, and sleeping. When she comes back, they’re still in hot debate, but the air has changed somehow around them.

Gon turns, whip fast. “What do you think Canary?” he asks. “Do you think we could pull it off?”

She pulls the silver serving tray tight against her chest. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I didn’t hear—?”

Killua elbows Gon out of the way to get to her. He’s grown taller since she last saw him, and it fills her with a tide of nostalgia, a longing for the nights when they would sit on the swingset together, in a quiet heavy with unsaid conversations, watching darkness overtake the property.

“Gon thinks,” Killua says, casting a glare over his shoulder, “we should take Alluka away for good. Get her emancipated, like you were.”

“I thought you were just going to take her for a couple days,” Canary says, slowly, buying herself time. “And back before anyone noticed she was missing.”

“We _are_ ,” Killua says. “I’m trying to explain to Gon what ‘a fuck ton of lawyers’ actually _means_. There’s no way we can pull this off. We’ll get arrested, and Gon can’t afford that.”

What Canary really wants to tell him is, you left me alone here just like you left Alluka. What she wants to tell him is, I had no one until I found her. What she wants to tell him is, if you take her too then I’ll be alone in this house with no one of my own, not even a borrowed someone, not even a sister that isn’t mine.

What she says is, “Could you even afford to take care of her? She’s at that age where she’ll eat just about everything in the house if you’re not careful.”

Gon, whose reluctant father has been paying for Killua’s expenses the last six months, hesitates to shout the _yes_ he’d really like to shout. “I could take on some odd jobs,” he says, instead, “put away some funds for her. We wouldn’t have to ask anybody for anything.”

Canary watches Killua’s shoulders jerk, like he’s been shocked. She doesn’t know that this is the first time that Gon has ever offered to do something on Killua’s behalf, something important to him, but even she can recognize the way his eyes widen. The very fact that Gon is making the offer startles him.

Everything is muddy here. Canary tries to separate out what she wants for herself from what’s best for the people she loves. It’s selfish to keep Alluka if there’s a better life for her elsewhere. It’s selfish to try to keep Killua coming back, when they all know how much he loathes approaching his family.

She closes her eyes for just a moment, and then she says, “Maybe you should ask Alluka what she wants, before you decide everything.”

Killua pauses, and behind him Gon looks down at his toes, chagrined. “Sure,” they both say.

“I have—” she says, “—I have letters. I think your father is about to send her off to a boarding school somewhere. It might be the right time to take her, if she wants to go.”

The silence that falls is grim.


End file.
